


The Piper's Children

by CorundumBleu



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Wassy Wapose, Writing Exercise, written by Ruby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:48:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26570911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorundumBleu/pseuds/CorundumBleu
Summary: Five years later the children still follow the Pied Piper with no destination in sight.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	The Piper's Children

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the Write a Story You Worthless Piece of Shit Weekend Jamboree contest hosted by The Webcomics Review on Tumblr. ~~It is, in my opinion, not a complete story and not very good. Have you considered reading something else? I wrote a great[ATLA fic about a cabbage wedding](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23060986), have you seen that one instead?~~
> 
> (Edit: Revisiting this two weeks later, I'm a lot less unhappy with this story than when I first wrote it. In fact I almost like it. Why? Who knows! You should totally still go read the ATLA fic though.)
> 
> But yeah, I didn't really have any ideas when I started this and I forced myself to finish anyway. Because that's what you've got to do sometimes, right? I'm still thankful for the TWR community on discord for getting me off my but and motivating me to be creative despite an affliction of muselessness. Y'all rock!
> 
> ...oh, you're still here? Well, guess you can read this if you _really_ want to.
> 
> Prompt: Thousands of children spontaneously decide to chase after a jogger.

“Look what I got!” Pip yelled excitedly, waving an armful of baguettes over her head as she trotted back towards the group of jogging children. “Pretty sure they’s not even stale!”

Excited chatter swept over the ragged group of children as they clustered around Pip without breaking stride. Grubby hands grabbed the loaves eagerly and began dispersing it in a reasonable semblance of fairness throughout the group. Pip kept a torn-off heel for herself, grinning as the babble subsided into satisfied munching sounds. There never was quite enough food for everyone to feel full, but they had learned over the years how to take care of their own and the older kids always made sure the littlest got enough to keep up.

Gail, an older boy with shaggy dark hair, came over and poked her in the shoulder. “We gonna have trouble from the big folks this time? Only there’s some new little kids just got caught recently that I’m not sure could keep up if we had to book it.” 

Pip sighed and looked over her shoulder. The bakery was already fading into the distance, but she could still make out the silhouettes of the couple standing in the doorway. The woman had buried her face in the husband’s shoulder, who held her close. “Nah, those two ‘s alright. They put the bread out front when they saw me coming. I think they maybe lost a kid to him at some point.”

They glanced forward. At the front of the group a single man jogged, earbuds in and apparently oblivious to the several hundred grubby children keeping pace behind him. The kids themselves were a motley bunch with clothes in varying states of disrepair. Gail was the oldest among them, now approaching eighteen. Pip was thirteen, and the youngest members of the group were only six or seven. They had trouble keeping up, but falling behind wasn’t an option. The older children carried them when they were too exhausted to keep pace. 

Pip and Gail had both been original members of this strange retinue--five years of nonstop running. They ate as they moved, they slept to the rhythm of their feeting slapping on pavement. The jogger never seemed to tire, so the children never stopped either.

Not that they had much of a choice in the matter. If you got too far from him, maybe to steal food or because you were just too tired to keep up, that’s when the _MUSIC_ came. It sounded like drums that threatened to rip you apart from the inside out, thumping through your bones like you were the instrument, the strings felt like they were being played on your own sinews and the wind instruments sucked their air right out of your lungs until you were sure you would suffocate.

As long as you stayed close to the jogger it wasn’t too bad. So the kids made sure no one fell behind.

Five years of running, with no destination as far as the kids knew. The first year had been the hardest. Endless days in the hot sun with blistered feet, raging thirst, no food--they hadn’t figured out how to peel off at the right time to steal it before the _MUSIC_ stole your mind away. Every town, a few more children would be swept up in the wake of their passage, and they would be pursued by adults, mothers and fathers desperately trying to snatch their children back. The jogger never tried to stop them, and never slowed. The children they did catch would kick and scream at first, and then fell listless and unresponsive as the jogger disappeared over the horizon. At night, after their parents tucked them into bed they would rise and begin to run again until they rejoined the group.

Nearly every kid had tried to run off at some point, but the _MUSIC_ always brought them back, glassy eyed and braindead. They usually recovered from that after a while, but it got worse the more times you tried. There were a few kids in their group like that, silent and dull-eyed, who only ate when the other children put food into their mouths for them.

Life had gotten better over the years. Fewer new children joined them, and they learned how to scrounge food and sleep on their feet. They developed calluses, in more ways than one. The villages they passed left them alone, calling them the lost children and watching sadly from cracked doors and shuttered blinds as the ragged parade trotted past. Some even set out food for them, like that couple at the bakery had. The jogger’s route was winding and often looped back through towns they had seen before. Three times now they had passed through the village which had been Pip and Gail’s home--or so Gail told her. She couldn’t remember her life before the jogger came. The _MUSIC_ had taken that from her. Whenever they returned she watchedfor faces in every window and wondered which ones might be the mother and father she had forgotten.

Pip gnawed her heel of bread. “Where d’ya think we’re going now, Gail?” She asked him. She always asked him that when the past crept up on her.

He snorted. “Same place as always, Pip. Nowhere.” 

“Well we gotta be going _somewhere_ , don’tcha think? Don’tcha think he gets bored just running all the time? I mean, he probably did something else before he started doing this. Can’t do this his whole life, can he?”

Gail didn’t respond right away. When he did, his voice was unusually quiet. “When we went through that town, I saw the date on one of the bulletins,” he said. He was one of the few kids that had been old enough to learn to read before the jogger had stolen them. “Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

“Aw shucks, man. Happy birthday.” She offered him the rest of her bread. “Not that it means much I guess, but you can have it fer a present.”

He shook his head. “I’m going to be eighteen, Pip. Back at home I’d be a man. I’d be finishing my apprenticeship, maybe I’d even be able to get married one day.” He gestured bitterly at the jogger ahead. “At least he got to have a life before all this. But what about us? Like I said, we’re going nowhere.”

He still talked about home like it actually meant something. That always puzzled Pip. “I’m gonna go talk to him,” she declared. Gail rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. She peeled away from him, lengthening her stride as she worked her way up the column of grubby children. Many of them waved and called as she jogged past. Spirits were always high after someone brought back food.

She approached the jogger, catching up to him right as they began to ascend a hill. “Hey, old man,” she said, keeping pace with him. “Where we going today? Brought ya some of the spoils if ya tell me.” She stuck out her hand with the last end of baguette. The man took it without looking at her. He did not eat it--in fact, she had never seen him eat or drink anything.

“Listen, I was thinking,” she continued, “it’s turning to fall soon, yeah? Gonna get cold again. Now I know you say the running keeps us warm”--he hadn’t said anything of the sort, of course, since he had never spoken to any of them--”but see I was thinking, what if we ran south for a bit? I heard someone say it gets warm down there ‘cause that’s where all the birds go. Or maybe the birds go there ‘cause it gets warm, I dunno. But the kids and I wouldn’t mind all the feathers if it kept things a bit warmer. If you know what I mean.”

The jogger didn’t respond. Which was fine, he never did. Pip sighed and looked around. She had vaguely recognized the small village with the bakery from early as one they had passed through before, but she was pretty sure they had left it in a different direction from last time. The hilly area around them looked new, but she’d be able to get a better look when they got to the top of the hill.

“See the way I figure it, you probably got it worse than us. Us, we all got the _MUSIC_ in our head. But you, well, you’re where the _MUSIC_ comes from, right? Or do them thingies in your ears keep it out?” She poked her finger towards the jogger’s earbuds, but he leaned out of reach. “I don’t think so though. Only a crazy person’d keep running this long. See I used ta think you were doing this for revenge or sommat--you know, steal all us children for, uh, retrerbution or what’s it called. But it’s been _years_ now. I think you made your point.”

She paused to catch her breath--it was a steep hill. The jogger didn’t slow or even glance her way. He seemed even more single mindedly focused on the road ahead usual, if that was possible.

“Sometimes I think maybe, well, maybe it all went wrong or something. Maybe the _MUSIC_ were too strong and caught you too.” Pip shook her head. “You kinda act like, ya know, the kids who run away too many times. And now ya can’t stop the _MUSIC_ even though you were the one who started it. Just sucks that ya had to hurt all of us along with it.” 

They jogged in silence for a while. “Still not gonna tell me where we going?” Pip asked as they neared the top of the hill. “Ah well. Guess I’ll find out soon enough.”

They reached the summit. On the other side, the sky was too big, and got all dark around the bottom and--”Blimey,” said Pip. “Is that the ocean?”

She’d never seen it before. She hadn’t even realized that they were close to it. Murmurs of awe sprang up behind her as the rest of the children crested the hill and took in the sight.

The jogger had already started down the path, which stretched all the way to coast below. “Wait up, chief!” Pip called, starting down after him. “We going there? It looks nice but I dunno if we can run in the water...” 

The jogger didn’t stop. He had never stopped for anything before, at least not anything that Pip had seen. 

Then again, Pip had neer seen the ocean before.

“Well,” she said to herself, settling into a pace behind the jogger, “at least ‘s something new.”


End file.
